I think the problem lies in for established cardiovascular disease risk factors As the great American philosopher D. Rumsfeld once famously pointed out [0]

I think the problem lies in for established cardiovascular disease risk factors As the great American philosopher D. Rumsfeld once famously pointed out [0], there are known knowns, known unknowns but there also are unknown unknowns :-) So I would not dismiss the argument at this point. Generalized anxiety has been shown to be a reliable predictor of coronary heart disease What the parent said applies here too. A statistical "predictor" isn't a statement about causation. What would need to be shown is a mechanism. How is the brain doing all those things that it is being blamed for? or is it really just sensing something and reacting, instead of causing it as is claimed? Why are so many people in those discussion satisfied as soon as the brain (or something much more fuzzy!) has been "identified" as the actor causing the problem? How is that an explanation for anything? I'm not in the medical field, but I've taken many medical courses, including neuroscience courses (plural, because I found it so interesting). I find those "explanations" baffling to say the least. All I see is that they are just shifting the problem somewhere else and calling it a day, sort of like Douglas Adam's "Somebody Else's Problem (SEP) field" that makes things invisible. [1] Also, that soooo many people take a statistical "prediction" as a real prediction, meaning an established causation, without question, always in similar discussions when people start citing stuff found on PubMed. Statistics is more like blood test measurements: It's a tool, to get a diagnosis you use it - but you don't base your result on it (just because a value is inside or outside some "standard range" doesn't mean much by itself). Not unless it's extreme, in which case you probably don't need statistics to begin with. . [0] Just for the fun and the memories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns and 35 seconds of video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaxqUDd4fiw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaxqUDd4fiw [1] http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Somebody_Else's_Problem_field http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Somebody_Else's_Problem_fi... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else's_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else's_problem for the more serious description